One Moms Quest to Contain the Chaos

Main menu

Post navigation

Hosting Thanksgiving Seemed Like Such A Great Idea….

I love Thanksgiving. The traditions our family have built around my favorite holiday is what has made it my favorite holiday.

Sitting on the couch at the beach house, watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, snacking on pre-meal goodies, taking a walk down on the beach, watching football all day….

>sigh<

It’s awesome.

This year though, they’ve gone and screwed up tradition by deciding to sell the beach house, so I am hosting Thanksgiving at our house.

For the first time ever, I am responsible for getting the meal together. For a good long time I have flown under the radar and have never been responsible for putting together the Big Meal.

Then it hits me, as I look at my sparse living room and empty fridge- oh my gosh, there is no piddling around, folks, there is work to be done!

I realized this weekend just how much work there was to be done. Like, we didn’t have a coffee table or end tables in the living room. We moved in 5 months ago and still don’t have major pieces of furniture. Also, the dog ate a corner of one of the dining room chairs. Pi was all, “We’ll never even notice it unless we have guests.”

Um, yeah! Like on Thanksgiving THIS COMING WEEKEND!

Then we looked around the house and at first glance it’s not so bad. Then you rub off your “we live in a house with 2 young kids” glasses and realize that there are fingerprints and dirty smudges on EVERYTHING. There is not an inch of the house- under the 3 foot mark that is- that doesn’t have some sort of smudgey dirt on it.

One thing I was happy about is that we had way enough wine glasses. But upon further inspection, we have 1 white wine glass and double bazillion red wine glasses and 0 “this is Thanksgiving we need nice water glasses”. I was surprised too about the 1 wine glass, what with all the white wine consumed over here, but the more you think about ALL.THE.WHITE.WINE. consumed over here it starts to make more sense. There have been many broken wine glasses. As in, I am on my third round of white wine glasses.

So I buy a 6 pack of white wine glasses and water glasses in the box so I don’t need to bother getting those damn sticky price stickers off the bottom. Imagine my RAGE, and that is what it was, RAGE, when I opened up the boxes and every single glass had a sticky price sticker on the bottom.

JUST PUT A PRICE TAG ON THE BOX!!!!!

But moving forward….

I spent days weeks painstakingly creating the menu and making my grocery list. I am AHEAD OF THE GAME I tell myself. Then this past weekend I realize nothing on my list had been bought, none of the tasks completed…I AM LAGGING BEHIND!

Panic set in. Wine was opened. Panic subsided.

I vented my woes to my Facebook peeps and a friend said, “good thing about Thanksgiving is that it is spent with people that love you and don’t care about your half eaten dog-chair!” Okay, that may not be a direct quote, but you get the idea. Another friend said, “just give them Tuaca and they’ll never notice”. That is a direct quote- he knows me well.

I am now more relaxed. I spent the evening making a cheesecake (from scratch, yep, that’s right- even the crust. FROM SCRATCH PEOPLE!!!), drinking wine and doing ridiculous celebratory “I made a cheesecake from scratch” dances in my kitchen which my husband looked on thinking to himself “I married a loony”.

In any case, this was a somewhat rambling mess of a post about why I’ve been too busy to regale you about tales of my crazy life. I hope to get back on track after the holiday’s.

On a more serious note, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday and I am excited to have my family and friends over to celebrate. I am blessed to have so much in my life and not for one minute do I forget how fortunate I am. Through the trials and struggles of the past couple years I’ve got a wonderful husband by my side. I’ve got healthy, albeit crazy, kids. I’ve got a core group of loyal friends that I can count on for ANYTHING, except for that time I dropped my keys at the Aerosmith concert and called one of those said “loyal friends” to come let me in my apartment because he’s the one I trusted with my spare key and it took 15 calls and sitting outside in the freezing cold for 3 hours (that may be an exaggeration) for him to show up.

To my crazy family, my crazy friends, and all the people out there that take time to read my post because perhaps you can relate- I wish you the happiest of Thanksgivings!